Initiatives are being implemented at buildings and structures level to city, township, district, state, and national level to achieve or increase economic growth, operational efficiency, sustainable development, and societal progress. These initiatives are commonly referred to as smart planet initiatives, smart city initiatives, smart building initiatives, and other such names (collectively referred to hereinafter as smart entity initiative or smart entity initiatives). The entities implementing these initiatives are correspondingly referred to as smart city, smart building, etc. (collectively referred to hereinafter as smart entity or smart entities).
As an example of smart city initiatives, cities are increasingly turning to analytical software systems to solve a variety of problems. The nature of these problems varies from optimizing emergency response, detecting possible issues in an electric grid, to identifying trends and patterns in citizen behavior.
Consider, as an example, the infrastructure of a city, which includes complex systems such as the electric grid and its thousands or millions of components, the traffic management system and its thousands or millions of components, and many other systems or networks.
These thousands or millions of components further include millions of sub-components that generate data of various types and for various purposes. For example, transformers in the electric grid have temperature monitoring sensors that produce and transmit transformer temperature data. This data is generated periodically, on a schedule, upon certain events, or a combination thereof.